ARTIST STATEMENT

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This is an ever evolving, changing and dynamic vision statement as I am an ever evolving artist and human. I welcome your thoughts, insights and questions.... 

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As a director and creative process facilitator, I am passionate about developing models of horizontal collaboration that empower shared leadership and cultivate community at the heart of artistic practice. In addition to a strongly visual and physical approach to staging and devising, my strengths are in the areas of new work development and in centering voices that push theatrical form and content. As a storyteller, I believe in a shared visual and experiential language and in cultivating rich partnerships with performers, designers, dramaturgs, movement directors, musicians and multi-media artists of all disciplines.

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As a theater practitioner and human, I am dedicated to the ongoing work of antiracism and anti-oppression. I learn, unlearn and evolve within the process of this work every day.  Part of reflecting this work for me is to acknowledge and work to dismantle the harmful power structures of white supremacy within myself and within the environments where I teach, devise and collaborate. This process is slow and imperfect. It is also vital in order to create space for new pathways of collaboration.

 

Unlearning old structures and co-creating new pathways is connected as much to the narratives, material and content that is centered in storytelling as it is to the form/method and process by which stories are told.  A part of my ongoing work as a white bodied artist is to yield space and power (psychic, physical)  to voices, leaders, narratives and perspectives outside my own. Exploring practices centered on community, connectivity and empowered authorship are vital within and beyond spaces where the work of theater making transpires.

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As an educator and student, I work towards the decentralization of white, cis, male hierarchy by working to center the stories and experiences of artists whose identities have been historically annexed from celebration, representation and amplification. (This is inclusive of but not limited to Black artists,  Indigenous artists, artists of color, womxn+ artists, artists in the LGBTQ+ community, artists with intersecting identities and all artists whose bodies, languages, voices and experiences in the world transcend narrow definitions, acronyms and categories)  These practices are vital in continuing to build sustainable, healing and joyful spaces of collective learning and liberation.

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The practice of making theater is the practice of making and remaking. Theater holds the capacity to reflect, to witness, to shine a light but also to activate imagination and to to engage each and every one of us in collective authorship and radical re-imagining of our world and our future.

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